New York, – Forty years after the premiere of the iconic feature film Apocalypse Now, a new version restored and reissued premiered this Sunday at the Tribeca Film Festival, about which its director, Francis Ford Coppola, spoke.
After the first viewing, the filmmaker told a public delivered the difficulties he experienced to make the film, considered one of the masterpieces of the seventh art, and showing the harshness of the Vietnam War.
“Nobody wanted to support Apocalypse Now,” said Ford Coppola, who reflected that the reason for the rejection was that the film came shortly after his success with The Godfather, and that he was expected to make a movie similar to it.
“The styles of my films were very different and that is not attractive,” he said, after which he confessed that no actor wanted to go with him to the Philippines, where the film was shot given the logistical facilities and the low price of the hand of work in the Asian country.
Thus, Ford Coppola had to put part of the money he had won with The Godfather for Apocalypse Now, since no Hollywood studio wanted to cover the costs, nor did it count on the support of the United States or the Army even though it told a story of the Vietnam conflict.
The director had such a bad time recording the movie, that he thought he would not survive his shooting. “He owed 30 million dollars, he was afraid, he had three children and a vineyard that he had just bought, and he was sure that he would lose it,” he said.
Among the complications, the destruction of much of the recording equipment when a typhoon hit the Philippines, and the heart attack suffered by the actor Martin Sheen, one of the protagonists, of which “it was not known if he would recover.”
However, Coppola went ahead with the project despite the risks involved. “If you want to make art you have to learn to be comfortable with the risk. (…) You can not do art without risk, just like you can not make babies without sex”.
The film, which was screened in US theaters For the first time on August 15, 1979, she was nominated for eight Oscars and revolves around the horrors of the Vietnam War in a free adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness.”
It has actors of the likes of Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Harrison Ford and Frederic Forrest, and raised about 150 million dollars at the box office.
This new version, called “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut”, was shown at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, where the VLFC very low frequency audio control technology was used, a speaker system designed to emit sounds that the human ear It can not perceive but it creates a sound effect that makes the body vibrate.
In addition, the film has been modernized with visual technology that multiplies by 40 the intensity of the colors and by 10 that of the blacks (EFE).
